Isle of Man records to be digitised

The Isle of Man Today website reports that the centre will initially hold 1.4 million photographs dating from the 1850s, as well as records of births, marriages, deaths, wills, census returns, property deeds and land holdings dating as far back as 1507.

Copies of the 14 Manx newspapers published since 1793 will also be available, along with 80 years of film and sound recordings played on plasma screens and audio stations. The biggest innovation will be the ability to view entries from all the archives at the same time at a single computer terminal. The new Ancestry Centre is now scheduled to open in the second half of 2010.

Isle of Man censuses from 1841-1901 are already available online at Ancestry.co.uk and other websites, while indexes of the island’s civil registration records and wills have been put online by the Isle of Man Family History Society. Baptisms and marriages from the island’s parish registers are included in the International Genealogical Index (IGI) at the FamilySearch website.